Maria Vidal de Haymes Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award

Professor Maria Vidal de Haymes Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award from the Archdiocese of Chicago

For decades, Professor Maria Vidal de Haymes has shown students and colleagues what it looks like to put social work values into practice alongside immigrants and refugees. On October 27, the Archdiocese of Chicago honored that commitment with a Lifetime Achievement Award at its 14th annual Keep Hope Alive fundraiser, which benefits the Archdiocese’s Immigration Ministry and National Pastoral Migratoria.

The award recognizes a career spent at the intersection of scholarship, teaching, and service. At Loyola University Chicago’s School of Social Work, Vidal de Haymes has helped prepare generations of social workers to accompany immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Students who have trained under her leadership have gone on to support migrants in Chicago and across borders.

Her work has extended well beyond the classroom. She has co-led an initiative to adapt a model for peer-lead migrant socioemotional care groups in partnership with colleagues from the Jesuit Migrant Services-Mexico, Universidad Iberoamericana- Mexico City, and the Pastoral Migratoria.  She has also served as co -coordinator of the Teaching and Research Dimension for the Jesuit Migration Network of the U.S. and Canada, and as a member of the Pastoral Migratoria National Advisory Board.

Keep Hope Alive celebrates leaders whose work advances the Archdiocese’s mission of welcome, and Vidal de Haymes joins a distinguished list of past honorees. The School of Social Work is proud to celebrate her and grateful for the example she sets every day.